Читать книгу Towards a Political Education Through Environmental Issues - Melki Slimani - Страница 11

Environmental and development issues (EDIs) have emerged as a matter of public interest through a new type of political mobilization that has characterized contemporary human societies: ecological mobilization (Zaccai and Orban 2017). These mobilizations, which act as alerts for a global ecological crisis, reflect an awareness of the potentially catastrophic effect of human activity on the ecological functioning of the planet (Little 2017). EDIs have thus appeared as indicators of a turning point in political life in the Anthropocene.

Ecological mobilizations have been brought to life in the form of popular movements at the global/international level, such as the Cities in Transition¹ movement, and at the regional level, such as the Climate Justice Action² movement in Europe. While the first proposed alternatives for a more resilient urban life to economic and climate crises (Krauz 2014), the second demanded a democratization of the climate discourse and a broadening of the scope of climate change action through a confrontation with the dominant capitalist system in order to break it with acts of disobedience. A recent analysis of the discourse of transitions shows that it is becoming heterogeneous and divided between two trends: a “localist” and politicized discourse in citizen and public policy initiatives on the one hand, and a mainly economic technocentric discourse (Audet 2016) on the other.

Comparing the conceptions of “political community” in these two movements also makes it possible to illustrate other trends running through them. In fact, actors in the Cities in Transition movement tend to see themselves as a harmonious geographical community linked to similar local communities (depoliticized conception), whereas actors in the Climate Justice Action movement conceive society explicitly in conflictual terms and consciously integrate themselves into this explicitly politicized context of contestation (Kenis 2016).

Parallel to these popular movements, the international political scene also has a movement aimed at institutionalizing these mobilizations. The first wave of institutionalization took place within the framework of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which was aimed at formulating expectations surrounding the link between environmental problems (resulting from the ecological crisis) and the development of human societies (Boutaud 2005). The second wave took shape within the World Commission on Environment and Development (1983–1987) leading to the “Brundtland Report³”. This report made it possible to reformulate the environmental issue in the light of the interests and expectations of various stakeholders. The third was within the framework of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, leading to declarations and thematic conventions (the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Declaration on Forests and the Convention to Combat Desertification), Agenda 21 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The most recent wave gives rise to the Agenda 2030 in the form of 17 goals (with their targets and indicators) for sustainable development by 2030. This agenda, developed by UN expert groups, is reviewed by the Economic and Social Council (the body responsible for coordination and dialogue on economic, social and environmental issues) and then approved by the UN General Assembly (the deliberative and decision-making body).

In fact, in the international arena, several EDIs – such as those arising from agroecology – constitute “contested” territory between institutionalization movements and social movements. There are two camps of actors in the field of agroecology: the camp of the World Bank and its “allies” (agricultural universities, governments, private sector, etc.) on the one hand, and the camp of social movements (Latin American agroecology movement, Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology, International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, etc.) on the other. These two types of actors mobilize two opposing visions: one that sees agroecology as a set of tools to perfect the technical procedures of modern agriculture, and another that sees it as an alternative which provides tools to transform agricultural policy monocultures (Giraldo and Rosset 2018).

In Tunisia, environmental struggles re-emerged in the period following the events of 2011. In fact, the context of political change which was triggered has been accompanied by the emergence of environmental social movements in a way that makes it difficult to characterize such movements, even in general terms (Vernin 2017). However, the frankly political imprint of these movements remains salient. It is also noteworthy that the political management of conflicts over state land shows a trend towards institutionalizing this type of mobilization in Tunisia. This institutionalization has taken the form of a project called “Promotion of Organizations and Mechanisms of the Social and Solidarity Economy” (PROMESS). The project, advanced by the Tunisian government in its cooperation with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and funded by the Netherlands, was spread over a four-year period from 2016 to 2019 (Mokadem 2018). The creation of a legal and institutional framework specific to the social and solidarity economy is one of the main axes within this project. A draft law⁴ on the social and solidarity economy was already being finalized by the Ministry of Social Affairs by May 2018.

Field studies of environmental mobilizations show that these practices are part of an informal⁵ political education through the learning that develops among the actors who take part in it (Seguin 2015). These civic apprenticeships (Biesta 2011) on conflict and the construction of collective agreements through participation and deliberation form an informal educational process of socialization for a democratic citizenship. According to Kluttz and Walter (2018), these mobilizations involve three interconnected levels of informal political learning:

 – the first level, which is microscopic, corresponds to learning that takes place in self-directed situations (individual study of environmental issues, for example), in situations where activists observe and experiment, or in situations where activists participate in conversations during workshops organized by non-governmental organizations;

 – the second level, which is mesoscopic, includes the learning that takes place when activists, in elaborating their strategies to combat an issue, consider their experiences in a broader context that integrates the experiences of other activists;

 – the third level, which is macroscopic, corresponds to the political learning that takes place when activists interact with their allies or opponents (police, government institutions, businesses, etc.) in forming their petitions.

In non-formal education, Eco-Schools are one of the pioneering schemes (founded in 1994 in Denmark) that have been implemented around EDIs. In several countries⁶ around the world, this initiative has been developed in primary, middle and high schools (eco-schools) and universities (eco-campuses). It consists of learning support on six priority topics (food, biodiversity, waste, water, energy, social support) for the concrete implementation of sustainable development in educational institutions in partnership with the local community and the students’ parents.

Non-formal education around EDIs is also affected by international educational policies. Historically, the latter shows two successive cycles of “educational institutionalization” taking the form of two recommended mechanisms that have succeeded one another over time: the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals.

In formal education, EDIs are covered by disciplinary curricula. In France, three school and/or academic disciplines deal with these questions: life and earth sciences, which take on the environmental dimension; economics, which takes on the economic dimension; and geography, which takes on the social dimension (Simonneaux 2011). Vergnolle Mainar (2008, 2009) notes that geography and life and earth sciences are the two disciplines that overlap the most with the environmental approach. This author also identifies areas of interdisciplinarity in the school disciplines concerned with the environment, which she differentiates into two groups: disciplines which have a significant overlap with environmental topics (life sciences, earth sciences and geography) and disciplines which are fairly unrelated to environmental topics (physics, chemistry, mathematics, technology, physical education and sport, history, civic education, economic and social sciences, French, philosophy, artistic disciplines and languages). The Tunisian context presents almost the same characteristics when it comes to school disciplines involving environmental issues.

The two international educational policy cycles mentioned above, as well as the disciplinary curricula, constitute inflections allowing the passage from informal education in ecological mobilizations to non-formal education or to formal education. Moreover, aspects in this educational trilogy can be hybridized as the line between formal, non-formal and informal becomes increasingly blurred (Barthes and Alpe 2018).

Several research programs on the links between the political and content involving EDIs in formal and non-formal education are being implemented around the world. Research in the Americas has focused on the interactions of formal and non-formal environmental education (e.g. for adults) with the dominant neoliberal political and economic context (Hursh et al. 2015; Stahelin et al. 2015). They open up a discussion of pedagogical practices and content that teachers can use to help learners develop forms of environmental citizenship that actively challenge the neoliberal privatization of environmental responsibility (Dimick 2015).

Other programs follow the French tradition of didactic research: that of the didactics of socially acute questions (SAQs) and that of the didactics of the curriculum of education for sustainable development (ESD). In these two programs, the political is presented according to a double register: strategic and tactical (Lange 2011). Indeed, the work of Lange (2011, 2013, 2015) on the didactics of the ESD curriculum puts forward the political as a strategic purpose of this education on the one hand and as an organizing (tactical) principle of educational situations on the other. This research has enabled proposing an analytical model of the functioning of an educational situation for sustainable development as a social academic practice of democracy. Furthermore, the work of Simonneaux (2013b) and his team (Simonneaux 2011; Bérard et al. 2016) presents the political according to the strategic register of education geared towards scientific citizenship and according to a tactical register as organizers of situations of debate and deliberation on problematic environmental issues. Such scientific citizenship can be the aim of non-formal education for the political (action research aimed at popular education in politics).

Another program borrows from the Nordic tradition (Håkansson et al. 2017) whereby the political dimension of EDIs is identified in four aspects of the political as:

 – generating inclusion and consensus;

 – containing cognitive and emotional elements;

 – involving power;

 – representing a decision-making process.

The researchers involved in that program aim to transpose the idea of the political dimension practice of teaching and research to educational situations involving EDIs. Indeed, the work of Håkansson et al. (2017) proposes a categorization of these situations according to the political trend running through them. This trend may take the form of “democratic participation”, “political reflection”, “political deliberation” or a “political moment”. More recently, these researchers (Håkansson and Östman 2018) have proposed an analytical model integrating four phases of the “political moment” in these educational situations. The work of Van Poeck and Vandenabeele (2012) and Van Poeck et al. (2014) underline the importance of analyzing the democratic character of educational practices in terms of enriching the discussion on the democratic paradox in environmental education and sustainable development. Subsequently, these researchers set out to develop a method for analyzing “political movement” to study how teachers’ actions facilitate or hinder the opening of space for the political in educational situations (Van Poeck and Östman 2017). The work of Sund and Öhman (2014) and Sund (2016) proposes a reconsideration of the political in environmental education and sustainable development according to several guidelines (unmasking the political dimension, repoliticizing education, seeing beyond the relativistic and objectivistic divide and using emotion as a driving force).

Curricula are objects of formal schooling that privileges the universalization of its contents and strives to prohibit the unexpected and heterogeneous (Ardoino and Berger 2010). Non-formal education systems are also formalizations of the informal with normative drifts (Barthes 2017). Taking these two facts into account leads to the problem of the “fate” of the political in the EDIs when it comes to its inflections in non-formal and formal education.

This book aims to build a model in order to structure the political in educational content involving EDIs. The components of this model serve as didactic guidelines for the elaboration of the content of a possible curriculum for a political education through these questions. The book consists of six chapters.

Chapter 1, which follows the introduction, suggests that EDIs should be categorized into metathemes: environmental policies and environmental change, environmental ethics, sustainable development, agri-food issues, environmental technology and environmental management and, finally, the issue of transitions. This chapter also proposes a differentiation of the constitutive themes of these metathemes according to their anti-political or political trend. This thematic categorization refers to a historical analysis of human political thought.

Chapter 2 focuses on the development of a conceptual and analytical framework for the political potential of EDIs. This analysis identifies this potential in four components: environmental literacy, environmental deliberation, ecological citizenship and collective environmental action.

Chapter 3 presents a conceptual elaboration of political learning in educational content involving EDIs in relation to the socialization process. This learning is categorized according to four areas: learning about ecoliteracy in relation to disciplinary cognitive socialization, learning about citizenship in relation to political socialization, learning about deliberation in relation to critical cognitive socialization and learning in action regimes in relation to democratic socialization.

Chapter 4 presents the methodology for data collection and analysis. This chapter introduces the empirical research by justifying the choice of two case studies and sources of evidence considered in this study: analyses of official documents, guided interviews for teachers and learners, and observations of classroom sessions using observation grids.

Chapter 5 presents the results of analyses of educational content in a first case study chosen in non-formal education: that of learning content in the UNESCO document entitled “Education for the Sustainable Development Goals”.

Chapter 6 presents the results of the analysis of in the case of formal education: that of content involving EDIs in Tunisian secondary and undergraduate curricula.

1 1 The urban transition movement initially originated in Great Britain in 2006 with Rob Hopkins who, along with his students, proposed a transition model for a city. Today, there are several other transition initiatives in several countries around the world, which form an international transition network.

2 2 In Europe, Climate Justice Action is a network of European grassroots movements that came into being in October 2014 at a time when COP21 symbolized the collective struggle for climate and social justice.

3 3 This report is entitled “Our Common Future”.

4 4 Accessible online on the Tunisian legislative portal: http://www.legislation.tn/sites/default/files/files/textes_soumis_avis/texte/mshrw_qnwn_lqtsd_ljtmy_wltdmny_1.pdf.

5 5 Informal education corresponds to learning that takes place in daily activities outside the academic framework of formal education and all other organized educational processes, such as those of non-formal education and its devices, including popular education or literacy (Brougère and Bézille 2007).

6 6 These non-formal education mechanisms are absent in Tunisia. No Tunisian school is registered on the network of eco-schools website: http://www.ecoschools.global/national-offices/.